“... verse was much more than this. It was a rich political resource. Neo-Latin panegyrics were a good means of winning friends and pleasing princes. Latin verse was also the perfect medium for humanist poets who wished to go beyond the parochial constraints of national politics to address a wider audience of freer thinking international readers. Thomas More’s ...”

“... of the whole enterprise: the recasting of the system of roads and thoroughfares. Efficient means of transport, both to and from and within the city was the founding principle of the grands travaux. The original idea was to link the railway stations, both with each other and with the city centre. Contemporary Paris was to be first and foremost a ...”

“... for a man who had to make a living, there was no reason for ‘travelled people of independent means’ to ‘remain there for more than a week’. Consequently, his son was educated at Eton and New College but did not then go to South Africa. Apart from Brand, Astor was the only member of the group who often exercised good judgment; he did not display it ...”

“... that such attacks have done the Government any electoral good at all. To spend more, of course, means to tax more. As with spending, there have been surreptitious (or, like increases in petrol tax, would-be surreptitious) increases in taxation; but underspending can probably only be corrected, given the Government’s reluctance to borrow more, by increases ...”

“... programme of middle-income housing just as the federal government was promoting suburbanisation by means of home loans, highway construction and mortgage insurance, and in the two decades after 1945 unions built nearly 40,000 co-operative apartments. Central to this postwar Popular Front culture was the Communist Party, a significant presence in the city’s ...”

“... daunting difficulties, as do the political ramifications: identifying an origin automatically means pointing an accusing finger, and who would accept being stigmatised as the group or nation which gave Aids to the world? And once it became clear that Africa was the continent not just worst, but first ravaged, the problem became all the more sensitive. In ...”

“... a major role in modern Hebrew prose, partly because it is an aestheticised (civilised, liberal) means of choking off the Other’s voice, leaving him or her the right to speak only on condition that the ‘I’ has the final say. Yet, when Oz speaks to himself, about himself, for the first time in his long public career, he sounds more sincere than he ever ...”

“... a powerful critic of the confessional fiscal-military states of 18th-century Europe, Britain by no means excluded. Smith complained of their ‘public prodigality and misconduct’, their ‘expensive and unnecessary wars’, their ‘great fleets and armies’. Nor did he care for the national prejudices which accompanied, and ...”

“... refers to him as ‘that other detective … the sad one’, no one has to ask which one she means. A stocky man in his fifties, shabbily dressed, rumpled from sleeping in an armchair, he lives on ‘cold boiled sheep head’ and ‘tubs of curds’. He kills time by browsing in his book collection – mostly accounts of ‘missing persons in ...”

“... books. St Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote a Latin riddle with the title arca libraria, but what that means is, clearly, ‘book-box’. Very few Anglo-Saxons had access to enough books to warrant even a bookshelf. As Michael Lapidge tells us, they kept their ‘libraries’ in boxes, and when an Anglo-Saxon scholar ‘wished to consult a book, he got down on his ...”

“... French version, the yarmulka is out and the cross (along with the hand of Fatima and the Star of David) has to be very discreet, while some tricky technical problems remain over how to rule on Sikh students. Opponents, including the main French human rights organisation, La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, have argued rightly that the veil is the real target ...”

“... them to pulse against one another – now drawing in, now glaring out’, shows a consciousness of means, of the pleasures an artist might derive from the act of making which could then become pleasures for an audience. In Mirror of the World a large-scale account of world art is mapped onto a geo-chronological structure, but one traverses these wide ...”

“... Despite the weight of sometimes conflicting detail, however, a distinctive view of what the strike means in the 2020s emerges from Gildea’s testimonies.The more familiar high politics interpretation of the dispute is disrupted by regional perspectives. Gildea tells us, for example, that it didn’t in fact start at Cortonwood: he interviews miners from ...”

“... as a set of demands that served as a precursor to full equality for all. Socialism was the means to ensure the enlargement of rights beyond those enshrined in the text – individual and public freedoms – to the economic domain. This was the core of his liberal socialism: anti-determinist; inflected by a belief in the noneconomic needs of individuals ...”

“... across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix to Ornamentalism (2001), David Cannadine described the way his father, who had been stationed overseas during World War Two, ‘talked endlessly about India’. Unlike Hall and Cannadine, Bernard Porter remembered the empire coming up rarely during his childhood – no family connections ...”